The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  With the coming of night, the Morlock emerged from a deeper shade in the forest. He stretched working his muscles more as a cat will than a human — and he massaged his injured leg. Then he spent some minutes on finger-combing the hair on his face, chest and back.

  At length he came hobbling over to me; the purple light of the sunset glinted from his starred and cracked goggles. He fetched me more water, and with my mouth moistened, I whispered, “How long?”

  “Three days.”

  I had to suppress a shudder at the sound of his queer, liquid voice. You might have thought I would be used to Morlocks by now; but after three days spent lying helpless, it came as something of a shock to be reminded that I was isolated in this hostile world, save only for this alien of the far future!

  Nebogipfel made me some chowder. By the time I had eaten, the sunset was gone, and the only illumination came from a sliver of young moon which hung low in the sky. Nebogipfel had discarded his goggles, and I could see his huge, gray-red eye, hovering like the moon’s translucent shadow in the dark of the hut.

  “What I want to know is,” I said, “what made me ill?”

  “I am not certain.”

  “Not certain?” I was surprised at this unusual admission of limitation, for Nebogipfel’s breadth and depth of knowledge were extraordinary. I pictured the mind of a nineteenth-century man as something analogous to my old workshop: full of information, but stored in a quite haphazard way, with open books and scraps of notes and sketches scattered over every flat surface. By comparison with this jumble, the mind of a Morlock — thanks to the advanced educational techniques of the Year 657,208 — was ordered like the contents of a fine encyclopedia, with the books of experience and learning indexed and shelved. All this raised the practical level of intelligence and knowledge to heights undreamed of by men of my time. “Still,” he said, “we should not be surprised at the fact of illness. I am, in fact, surprised you have not succumbed earlier.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He turned to me. “That you are a man out of your time.”

  In a flash, I understood what he meant.

  The germs of disease have taken toll of Humanity since the beginning — indeed, were cutting down the prehuman ancestors of man even in this ancient Age. But because of this grim winnowing of our kind we have developed resisting power. Our bodies struggle against all germs, and are altogether immune to some.

  I pictured all those human generations which still lay ahead of this deep Age, those firefly human souls which would flicker in the darkness like sparks, before being extinguished forever! But those tiny struggles would not be in vain, for — by this toll of a billion deaths — man would buy his birthright of the earth.

  It was different for the Morlock. By Nebogipfel’s century, there was little left of the archetypal human form. Everything in the Morlock’s body — bones, flesh, lungs, liver — had been adjusted by machinery to permit, Nebogipfel said, an ideal balance between longevity and richness of life. Nebogipfel could be wounded, as I had seen, but — according to him — his body was no more likely to catch a germ infection than was a suit of armor. And indeed, I had detected no signs of infection about his injured leg, or his eye. The original world of Eloi and Morlock had devised a different solution, I remembered, for I had seen no disease or infection there either, and little decay, and I had surmised that that was a world cleansed of harmful bacteria.

  I, however, had no such protection.

  After my first brush with illness, Nebogipfel turned his attention to more subtle aspects of our survival needs. He sent me foraging for supplements for our diet, including nuts, tubers, fruit, and edible fungi, all of which were added to our staples of sea food and the flesh of those animals and birds stupid enough to allow themselves to be entrapped by my clumsy hunting with slings and stones. Nebogipfel also attempted to derive simple medicines: poultices, herbal teas, and the like.

  My illness filled me with a deep and abiding gloom, for this was a danger of time travel which had not occurred to me before. I shivered, and wrapped my arms around my still feeble body. My strength and intelligence could beat off Diatryma, and other massive natives of the Palaeocene, but they would offer me no defense against the predations of the invisible monsters borne by air, water and flesh.

  [5]

  The Storm

  Perhaps if I had had some experience of Tropical conditions before our stranding in the Palaeocene, I might have been prepared for the Storm.

  The day had been heavy and more humid than usual, and the air near the Sea had that odd, light-impregnated quality one associates with a forthcoming change of weather. That evening, exhausted by my labors and uncomfortable, I was glad to fall into my pallet; at first, though, the heat was so great that sleep was slow to come.

  I was woken by a slow patter of raindrops falling onto our loose roof of palm fronds. I could hear the rain coming down into the forest behind us — bullets of water hammering against the leaves — and pounding into the sand of the beach. I could not hear, or see, Nebogipfel; it was the darkest part of the night.

  And then the Storm fell on us.

  It was as if some lid had been opened up in the sky; gallons of rainwater came hurtling down, pushing in our palm-frond roof in a moment. The wreckage of our flimsy hut clattered down around me, and I was drenched to the skin; I was still on my back, and lay staring up into the rod-like paths of the raindrops, which receded into a cloud-obscured heaven.

  I struggled to get up, but soaked roof-fronds impeded me, and my pallet turned into a muddy swamp. Soon I was coated in mud and filth, and with the water hammering at my scalp and trickling into my eyes, I was all but blind.

  By the time I reached my feet, I was dismayed at the alacrity with which our shelter was collapsing; all its struts had fallen, or were leaning crazily. I could make out the boxy structure of Nebogipfel’s reconstructed time-device, but it was already all but buried by bits of the hut.

  I cast about in that sodden, slippery wreckage, dragging away fronds and bits of cloth. I found Nebogipfel: he looked like an oversize rat, with his hair plastered against his body and his knees tucked up against his chest. He had lost his goggles and was quivering, quite helpless. I was relieved to find him so easily; for the night was his normal time of operation, and he might have been anywhere within a mile or so of the hut.

  I bent to scoop him up, but he turned to face me, his ruined eye a pit of darkness. “The Time-Car! We must save the Time-Car!” His liquid voice was almost inaudible against the Storm. I reached for him again, but, feebly, he struggled away from me.

  With the raindrops hammering against my scalp, I growled in protest; but, gamely, I waded through the litter of our home to Nebogipfel’s device. I hauled great handfuls of fronds from it, but found the framework embedded in a deepening mud, all tangled up with clothes and cups and the remnants of our attempts at furniture. I took hold of the frame’s uprights and tried to haul the whole thing free of the mud by main force, but succeeded only in bending the shape of the frame, and then in snapping open its corners.

  I straightened up and looked about. The hut was quite demolished now. I saw how the water was beginning to run out of the forest, over the sand and down to the ocean. Even our friendly fresh-water stream was becoming broader and more angry, and itself threatened to burst its shallow banks and overrun us.

  I abandoned the Time-Car and stalked over to Nebogipfel. “It’s all up,” I shouted to him. “We have to get away from here.”

  “But the time-device—”

  “We have to chuck it! Can’t you see? We’re going to get washed into the Sea, at this rate!”

  He strove to rise to his feet, with hanks of his hair dangling like bits of sodden cloth. I made to grab him, and he tried to wriggle out of my grasp; if he had been healthy, perhaps, he could have evaded me, but his damaged leg impeded him, and I caught him.

  “I can’t save it!” I shouted into his face. “We’ll be lucky to get out of thi
s lot with our blessed lives!”

  And with that I threw him over my shoulder, and stalked out of our hut and towards the forest. Instantly I found myself wading through inches of cold, muddy water. I slipped more than once on the squirming sand, but I kept one arm wrapped around the wriggling body of the Morlock.

  I reached the fringe of the forest. Under the shelter of the canopy, the pressure of the rain was lessened. It was still pitch black, and I was forced to stumble forward into darkness, tripping on roots and colliding with boles, and the ground under me was sodden and treacherous. Nebogipfel gave up his struggling and lay passive over my shoulder.

  At last I reached a tree I thought I remembered: thick and old, and with low side-branches that spread out from the trunk at a little above head-height. I hooked the Morlock over a branch, where he hung like a soaked-through coat. Then — with some effort, for I am long past my climbing days — I hauled myself off the ground and got myself sat on a branch with my back against the trunk.

  And there we stayed as the Storm played itself out. I kept one hand resting on the Morlock’s back, to ensure he did not fall or strive to return to the hut; and I was forced to endure a sheet of water which ran down the trunk of the tree and over my back and shoulders.

  As the dawn approached, it picked out an eerie beauty in that forest. Peering up into the canopy I could make out how the rain trickled across the engineered forms of the leaves, and was channeled down the trunks to the ground; I am not much of a botanist but now I saw that the forest was like a great machine designed to survive the predations of such a Storm as this, far better than man’s crude constructions.

  As the light increased I tore a strip from the remains of my trousers — I was without a shirt — and tied it over Nebogipfel’s face, to protect his naked eyes. He did not stir.

  The rains died at midday, and I judged it safe to descend. I lifted Nebogipfel to the ground, and he could walk, but I was forced to lead him by the hand, for he was blind without his goggles.

  The day beyond the jungle was bright and fresh; there was a pleasant breeze off the Sea, and light clouds scudded across an almost English sky. It was as if the world was remade, and there was nothing left of yesterday’s oppressiveness.

  I approached the remains of the hut with some reluctance. I saw scraps — bits of smashed-up structure, the odd nut-shell cup, and so forth — all half-buried in the damp sand. In the midst of it all was a baby Diatryma, pecking with its great clumsy beak at the rubble. I shouted, “Hoi!” — and ran forward, clapping my hands over my head. The bird-beast ran off, the loose yellow flesh of its legs wobbling.

  I poked through the debris. Most of our possessions were lost — washed away. The shelter had been a mean thing, and our few belongings mere shards of improvisation and repair; but it had been our home — and I felt a shocking sense of violation.

  “What of the device?” Nebogipfel asked me, turning his blinded face this way and that. “The Time-Car — what of it?”

  After some digging about, I found a few struts and tubes and plates, bits of battered gun-metal now even more twisted and damaged than before; but the bulk of the car had been swept into the Sea. Nebogipfel fingered the fragments, his eyes closed. “Well,” he said, “well, this will have to do.”

  And he sat down on the sand and cast about blindly for bits of cloth and vine, and he began the patient construction of his time-device once more.

  [6]

  Heart and Body

  We never managed to retrieve Nebogipfel’s goggles after the Storm, and this proved to be a great handicap to him. But he did not complain. As before, he restricted himself to the shade during the hours of daylight, and if he was forced to emerge into the light of twilight or dawn he would wear his wide-brimmed hat and, over his eyes, a slitted mask of animal skin which I made for him, to afford him some sight.

  The Storm was a mental as well as a physical shock to me, for I had begun to feel as if I had protected myself against such calamities as this world might throw at me. I decided that our lives must be put on a more secure footing. After some thought I decided that a hut of some form, solidly founded, and placed on stilts — that is, above the run-off from future monsoons — was the thing to aim for. But I could not rely on fallen branches for my construction material, for these, by their nature, were often irregular of form and sometimes rotten. I needed tree trunks — and for that I would need an ax.

  So I spent some time as an amateur geologist, hunting about the countryside for suitable rock formations. At last I found, in a layer of gravelly debris in the area of Hampstead Heath, some dark, rounded flints, together with cherts. I thought this debris must have been washed here by some vanished river.

  I carried these treasures back to our encampment with as much care as if they were made of gold — or more; for that weight of gold would not have been of any value to me.

  I took to bashing up the flint on open spaces of the beach. It took a good deal of experimentation, and a considerable wasting of flint, before I found ways to crack open the nodules in sympathy with the planes of the stone, to form extensive and sharp edges. My hands felt clumsy and inexpert. I had marveled before at the fine arrow-heads and ax blades which are displayed in glass cases in our museums, but it was only when I tried to construct such devices for myself that I understood what a deep level of skill and engineering intuition our forefathers had possessed in the Age of Polished Stone.

  At last I constructed a blade with which I was satisfied. I fixed it to a short length of split wood, binding it in with strips of animal-skin, and I set off a high mood for the forest.

  I returned not fifteen minutes later with the fragments of my ax-head in my hand; for it had shattered on the second blow, with barely a cut made in the tree’s bark!

  However, with a little more experimentation I got it correct, and soon I was chopping my way through a forest of young, straight trees.

  For our permanent encampment, we would stay on our beach, but I ensured we were well above the tidal line, and away from the possibilities of flood from our stream. It took me some time to dig pits for the founds, deep enough to satisfy me; but at last I had erected a square framework of upright posts, securely fixed, and with a platform of thin logs attached at perhaps a yard above the ground. This floor was far from even, and I planned to acquire the skills of better plank-making one day; but when I laid down on it at night the floor felt secure and solid, and I had a measure of security that we were raised above the various perils of the ground. I almost wished another Storm down on our heads, so that I could test out my new design!

  Nebogipfel hauled his fragments of Time-Car up onto the floor by a little ladder I made for him, and continued his dogged reconstruction there.

  One day, as I made my way through the forest, I became aware of a pair of bright eyes studying me from a law branch.

  I slowed, taking care not to make any jerky movements, and slipped my bow from my back.

  The little creature was perhaps four inches long, and rather like a miniature Lemur. Its tail and face were rodent-like, with gnawing incisors quite clear at the front; it had clawed feet and suspicious eyes. It was either so intelligent that it thought it should fool me into ignoring it by its immobility — or else so stupid that it did not recognize any danger from me.

  It was the work of a moment to fit the string of the bow into the notch of an arrow, and fire it off.

  Now my hunting and trapping skills had improved with practice, and my slings and traps had become moderately successful; but my bows and arrows much less so. The construction of my arrows was sound enough, but I could never find wood of the right flexibility for the bows. And generally, by the time my clumsy fingers had loaded up the bow, most of my targets, bemused by my antics, were well able to scamper for cover.

  Not so this little fellow! He watched with no more than dim curiosity as my skewed arrow limped through the air towards him. For once my aim was true, and the flint head pinned his little body to the
tree trunk.

  I returned to Nebogipfel, proud of my prize, for mammals were useful to us: not just as sources of meat, but for their fur, teeth, fat and bones. Nebogipfel studied the little rodent-like corpse through his slit-mask.

  “Perhaps I shall hunt down more of these,” I said. “The little creature really didn’t seem to understand what danger he was in, right until the end. Poor beast!”

  “Do you know what this is?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I believe it is Purgatorius.”

  “And the significance—?”

  “It is a primate: the earliest known.” He let himself sound amused.

  I swore. “I thought I was done with all this. But even in the Palaeocene, one cannot avoid meeting one’s relatives!” I studied the tiny corpse. “So here is the ancestor of monkey, and man, and Morlock! The insignificant little acorn from which will grow an oak which will smother more worlds than this earth… I wonder how many men, and nations, and species, would have sprung from the loins of this modest little fellow, had I not killed him. Once again, perhaps I have destroyed my own past!”

  Nebogipfel said, “We cannot help but interact with History, you and I. With every breath we take, every tree you cut down, every animal we kill, we create a new world in the Multiplicity of Worlds. That is all. It is unavoidable.”

  After that, I could not bring myself to touch the flesh of the poor little creature. I took it into the forest and buried it.

  One day I set myself to follow our little fresh-water stream westwards towards its source, in the interior of the country.

  I set off at dawn. Away from the coast, the tang of salt and ozone faded, to be replaced by the hot, moist scents of the dipterocarps forest, and the overpowering perfume of the crowding flowers. The going was difficult, with heavy growth underfoot. It became much more humid, and my cap of nut-fiber was soon soaked through; the sounds around me, the rustling of vegetation and the endless trills and coughs of the forest, took on a heavier tone in the thickening air.